Ernie stepped from the car and reached under the blanket covering the passenger side of the front seat. He pulled out the .32 caliber Harrington and Richardson revolver he had taken from Tony's store and stuck it in his right coat pocket. Tucked in a holster at his left side was the Luger P-38 he had previously acquired from an acquaintance in Vineland. After checking the pistol shells in his pockets, Ernie slammed the driver-side door shut. He climbed the stairs to the wide concrete slab front porch and rapped sharply on the unlocked door. With a deep breath, he pushed open the door and stepped inside the rectangular room that was dominated on the opposite side by Mike's "library," two huge bookshelves that were filled to overflowing. Plush velour furniture and heavy curtains gave the room a cozy feeling. The walls were papered in a pale flowered pattern, while a brighter floral carpet stretched across the living room floor. A blonde-wood television with a twelveinch screen sat beneath a large, round mirror next to a plant in a ceramic pot, just inside the front door.
Ernie didn't notice anything as he entered except Tessie, who was curled up on a padded rocker in front of the fake stone fireplace watching TV. Her father sat at the back of the room, close to his beloved books. When she realized who their visitor was, Tessie rose with a look of horror on her face. Ernie saw that things were not going to go well. But a man had to try.
"What do you want?" Tessie demanded. She had enjoyed peace and quiet for a month now but here he was, determined once again to take that away from her.
"Do you still love me?" Ernie asked.
"What?"
"Do you still love me?" he asked again.
"You're crazy," she answered, her thoughts immediately racing toward her sons.
Before Ernie could say anything else, Mike stepped forward and ordered the younger man to leave the house. Ernie refused. If nothing else, he was going to see his children. As the two men exchanged words, Pearl hurried in from the adjoining dining room to find out who was causing all the commotion. Her face grew red with anger when she saw who was standing inside the door. Pearl jumped into the argument that continued to escalate between her husband and her son-in-law.
"Throw him the hell out!" she cried, at one point.
As the argument grew more heated over the next fifteen minutes, Pearl hollered, "Throw the son of a bitch out!"
Only Tessie had remained quiet during the dispute. Finally, Ernie again demanded to see the boys, but his in-laws declared that wasn't going to happen.
"You are crazy," Tessie interjected into the awkward silence that followed.
When Ernie realized that he was not going to get his way, he reached into his pocket and holster and pulled out his pistols. Brandishing the weapons, he thought triumphantly that they couldn't argue with him any longer. They'd know he was serious and would have to let him see his sons. But the guns didn't provoke the reaction he expected.
"Get out," Tessie ordered.
Mike moved quickly in front of his daughter, determined to protect her from this unwelcome intruder.
"That doesn't scare me," he told his son-in-law.
Mike may have been twenty-five years older, but he was confident he could get rid of Ernie. Although they were about the same height and weight, he had bounced the younger man out before; he would be happy to do it again. Ernie knew that if he backed down now, it would be the final humiliation. He would never regain his wife's respect. Obviously, there was only one way he was going to get what belonged to him. As Mike shoved him toward the front door, Ernie silently raised the Luger and pulled the trigger. Twice. One bullet pierced dangerously close to Mike's heart, while the second penetrated his left side. Ernie's father-in-law was struck with such force that he surged backward into the wall before he crumpled to the floor, his wire-rimmed glasses falling to his chin.
Tessie watched in wide-eyed horror. It had all happened so fast, she was unable to believe what she had just seen. In the background, she could hear her mother screaming, but Tessie's maternal instincts immediately took over. She had only one concern at that moment-protecting her children. She turned to run, but Ernie was too fast. As she fled into the adjoining dining room, he followed her and fired two more shots, hitting her in the right shoulder and in the right buttock. Tessie slumped to the floor.
In too much pain and too terrified to move, Tessie was still focused on the safety of her boys. What was he going to do? Would he hurt the kids? Would he take them? The bathroom door and her bedroom door at the back of the small dining room were visible on either side of the wood-veneer china cabinet, where all of Pearl's best dinnerware and other family heirlooms were displayed. Through the partially open bathroom door, Ernie could see young Michael standing on a stool, hunched over the bathroom sink, where he had been brushing his teeth. In the bedroom, he glanced over to see Ernest Jr., who was squirming fretfully in his crib.
As Tessie lay on the floor, scared and crying silently, her worst fears came true. Ernie might have claimed that he loved the boys, that he wanted to spend time with them. Apparently, he had decided if he couldn't have them, neither could she. Tessie watched as her estranged husband squeezed off two more shots, one in the direction of each child. Was this why he was so determined to see the boys, so that he could take them away from her forever? She could feel her heart break as one bullet pierced the heavy wooden bathroom door.
Pearl, although stunned, tried to call the police, but the phone was dead. The wires probably had been disconnected by her son-in-law. Her husband and daughter might be dead, she thought. Realizing that she was Ernie's next target, Pearl escaped quickly out the side door and ran across the street. She would go to her family. Her brothers would stop this madman.
Sprawled across the dining room floor, Tessie listened to the sound of footsteps disappearing in the distance before she dimly realized, with dawning horror, a second set was following. Ernie was just moments behind Pearl as she raced out the door. With the image of her father's body before her, Tessie prayed that her mother had safely reached the Pioppi house. Help would come. Help had to come. As she lay bleeding, Tessie heard the sound of more shots in the distance. What had happened to her sons? To her mother? She couldn't bear to think. Was she going to die? Overwhelmed by the pain, Tessie offered a silent prayer that the man she had loved not so long ago had killed himself after destroying her family.
The Mazzoli house grew still as Tessie faded in and out of consciousness. Baby Ernest, who had been awakened by the sound of gunfire, continued crying in his crib, while his terrified older brother hovered in the bathroom. Michael could see his mother lying on the floor. He knew something was wrong, but the frightened two-year-old didn't know what to do. He stayed hidden when he heard the arguing and then the loud noises. Something bad had happened to his mother, and he couldn't see either one of his grandparents. Little did the child or his mother realize that another nightmare was unfolding across the street.
When Pearl collapsed in the entryway of the Pioppi home, Jino and his sixty-seven-year-old mother, Theresa, quickly raised her from the floor and half-carried her to the couch in the small sitting room at the back of the house where they had been watching television. Jino's mind was racing, trying to process what he had heard. Little Ernie. With guns. Shooting people. It didn't make sense. Theresa, however, didn't need to stop and think. Her daughter said there was trouble. She had to help.
As his mother ran to the front door, Jino headed to the desk in an alcove under the stairs in the hallway, where the telephone stood. He dialed "0" on the black rotary phone, and when a switchboard operator answered, he shouted, "Come right down, there's a shooting here! Ernie ..."
Walked through the door at that moment.
At almost the same time that Jino was attempting to reach help, Theresa had stepped out onto the front porch. As Jino watched, Ernie shot his mother twice, once in the abdomen and again in her right side. After she fell, half in and half out of the doorway, Ernie stepped over her body into the foyer. His face was a stone mask, void of emotion. W
ithout a word, he shot Marion, who had instinctively grabbed little Teresa from her crib and started down the stairs when she heard the gunfire. Although she posed no threat, Ernie had silently opened fire again, killing the young mother and her unborn child with two more shots from the carbine. Little Teresa, who had fallen from her mother's arms onto the hallway's hard wooden floor, was crying in fear but miraculously escaped further injury.
Ernie quickly fired twice at Jino, but missed his target as the older man dropped the telephone and ran out of the back door, hoping to get help from their neighbors. The farmer still could not believe what he had just seen. As he raced toward the garage, more shots rang out. Jino realized that he couldn't leave his family in the house to face a crazy man with a gun. Running back in through the kitchen door, he discovered that, during those few minutes, Ernie had inflicted still more damage on the Pioppi family.
Pearl, his primary target, was lying in a pool of blood in the hallway near the phone. Ernie had emptied both of his guns into her. Stepping from the kitchen toward the front of the house, Jino saw his wife lying on the floor of the living room, just a few feet away from his mother's body. Bloodstains were clearly visible through the multicolored pattern of each woman's housedress. Surveying the massacre, Jino heard a noise from the next room. His heart pounding, he turned as Jeannie stumbled toward him and cried, "Daddy!" before she fell at his feet. The nine-year-old, covered in blood, had been shot twice.
As his younger brother telephoned for help, John Pioppi pushed little Mando and the baby under the chrome-edged kitchen table for safekeeping, then picked up a sharp knife and ran out the kitchen door on the north side of the house. John was determined to stop Ernie. He didn't need to think about anything-he knew what he had to do. Creeping silently around the side of the house, he heard the front door open a few minutes later and saw Ernie moving rapidly across the lawn. John tore off after the younger man, but Ernie turned when he heard footsteps approaching and opened fire with deadly accuracy. Struck in the stomach, John fell backward, fatally wounded at the edge of the Pioppis' front yard. In the meantime, Jino saw his chance. He gathered the two younger children in his arms, and raced south across the fields to the home of his older sister, Carmeline Caselli.
"Call the state police," he hollered to Carmeline, as he deposited the crying children with her and ran back toward the house for Jeannie. He wasn't sure if his oldest daughter was alive, but if she was, he had to try and get her to safety.
As Jino raced across the fields, Armando Pioppi had shuffled downstairs to see who was making all the noise while he was trying to sleep. In his long underwear, the patriarch of the family walked first toward his wife. Calling her name, he tried to raise Theresa's head from the floor, but there was no response. Shocked by all the blood, Armando turned and glanced toward the dining room, where he saw young Jeannie, in bloodstained bedclothes, sprawled across the floor in front of the radiator. Lifting the wounded child carefully, Armando deposited her on the couch in the sitting room. He then heard a weak cry from the hallway. Stepping through the doorway, he walked down the hall to find his daughter lying in a pool of blood on the floor near the desk.
"Pia? Pia, what happened?" Armando asked in Italian, reaching for his daughter's hand, still unable to grasp the enormity of the scene.
"It was Ernie, Papa," Pearl gasped, clinging to his hand. "Ernie killed us all."
Whimpering with pain, Pearl lost consciousness. With tears in his eyes, Armando went upstairs to quickly dress, then walked out the door toward the Mazzoli farm. He would get Mike. Mike would help. As Armando stepped into his front yard, he was horrified to see the body of his oldest son lying at the edge of the lawn. Gripped by a sense of urgency, he couldn't stop; he had to see what else had happened. He had to find out if Mike, Tessie, and the boys were all right.
It had only taken Ernie about fifteen minutes to inflict a lifetime of damage on four generations of his wife's family. He had already disappeared into the night when Theresa's brother arrived at the Pioppi house at about 9:15 P.M. Dominick Biagi was surprised to see the front door open when his daughter Eva stopped the car and let him off in the front yard. The porch light was on, so when he climbed the front steps, he could see his sister Theresa lying in the doorway. At first, Dominick thought she had fainted, but when he tried to pick her up, he saw the blood and then the bullet casings strewn across the floor of the entry hall and dining room. He glanced into the open door. When he didn't see anyone in the house, Dominick raced across the street to the Mazzoli house and entered through the open side door. Horrified, he saw Mike lying dead on the floor but never noticed Tessie or her children.
"Where is all the people gone?" Dominick asked the silence.
As he ran back across the road, he finally registered John's body on the ground. Inside the Pioppi house, he found Pearl, still on the floor, moaning in pain. As he stepped back outside to go for help, Dominick was startled by the sudden appearance of a New Jersey state trooper, who ordered him to leave the premises. You don't have any business here, the officer said.
"Why I ain't got any business here!? This is my sister, my niece, and my nephew!" Dominick declared. "They got my sister and all the people here! Why no I got no business here!?"
Piney Hollow was one of those rural regions that the New Jersey State Police had been formed to protect in 1929. Outside the drama of the Lindbergh kidnapping in 1932 and the emergency landing of the plane in the Pioppis' field, the troopers who patrolled the back roads of South Jersey were primarily used to handling complaints that ranged from hunters trespassing on a farmer's fields to drunken drivers. The hysterical phone calls that they received on the night of November 17, 1950, at the Malaga barracks would lead them to a brand-new type of crime for the once-peaceful region.
When an anxious Bell Telephone operator routed the first frantic call from her switchboard to the Malaga barracks of the New Jersey State Police at about 8:55 P.M., Trooper Donald Smalley, who was assigned to the desk that night, heard a man's voice shouting that they needed help at Mike Mazzoli's house. The man, probably Jino Pioppi, dropped the phone before Smalley could gather further information. But the trooper listened in horror to the sound of gunfire and a woman screaming, then more shots being fired.
In 2008, Vineland resident Judy Martinelli Gallo vividly remembered that night because she was on duty as a telephone switchboard operator and fielded one of the calls when they started coming in. At eighteen, fresh out of high school, Gallo was thrilled to be one of about twenty women who worked at the New Jersey Bell office at Landis Avenue and Sixth Street in Vineland's popular downtown area. Although she worked shifts, Gallo considered herself lucky to have landed the job, which paid well and was considered more pres tigious than factory work. Landis Avenue was always alive with activity as area residents shopped in well-maintained stores like J. J. Newberry's and dined in family-run restaurants where seconds were always available. Although she later bought a car, Gallo initially caught the bus back and forth to work from just outside her parents' home on Rogers Avenue.
Gallo recalled working a split shift on Friday, November 17, 1950. After finishing in the morning, she went home for a few hours. She ate an early dinner and returned to work the 6:00 to 10:00 P.M. shift. It was just another night until about nine o'clock, when she took the call from Piney Hollow Road: "It was one of the relatives, a woman, a young girl actually, and she was hysterical." The girl was screaming so badly that she didn't realize at first help was already waiting on the other end of the line.
"I asked her what the problem was," Gallo said, but as she listened she "could hear the bullets shooting in the background."
Horrified, Gallo immediately called her supervisor, then the police, and finally the hospital, as the girl on the line screamed, "Help! Help! Please get somebody over here!" The concerned operator kept the unknown caller on the line for almost half an hour, listening to more shots and screaming. She told the girl, "Don't hang up. We're going to see what we c
an do here to get you some help." When Gallo learned that the police had been dispatched, she remembered, "We told her help was on its way." When she asked the young woman if the person was still there, she replied, "He was running out of the house." Even after so many years, the horror of that night still clouded Gallo's normally smiling face.
"I couldn't believe what I was hearing," she said.
Gallo was so upset that she called her fiance, who picked her up at work. But she didn't want to go home. Although she never learned the identity of the voice on the opposite end of the line, she persuaded her future husband to drive first to Newcomb Hospital and then out to the scene of the crime. By that time, the police had left, as had the family members and friends who had gathered there just a short time before. In the weeks that followed, Gallo followed the course of the trial with interest, finding it hard to believe-even today-that such a crime could occur in South Jersey.
After receiving the initial call, Trooper Smalley had hung up the phone and tried to call the Mazzoli farm, but was told by an operator that the line was out of order. Just a few minutes later, the barracks phone rang again. The call was from the Caselli house, where Jino had dropped off the two younger children. Carmeline's mother-in-law, Estelle, was on the line begging the troopers for help. The Malaga barracks, about five miles west on Route 47 in Franklinville, erupted into action. With sirens screaming, several cars arrived at Piney Hollow Road at about 9:30 that night to discover a nightmarish scene.
Troopers George Yeager and Herbert Kolodner were the first to arrive at the site of the shootings. They pulled to a stop in front of the Pioppi home when their headlights caught sight of a body by the side of the road. Yeager jumped from the patrol car to move John Pioppi's legs away from the driveway, so that the ambulances and other patrol cars could pull into the yard. Theresa Pioppi's body lay partially in the doorway, while her daughter-in-law lay nearby. When he saw a dazed Armando standing on the porch, Yeager at first thought he might have done the shooting. Yeager tried to question the older man, but Armando couldn't respond because he didn't speak any English.
Rain of Bullets: The True Story of Ernest Ingenito's Bloody Family Massacre Page 3